3.3.3 LineNumberTable Attribute

The LineNumberTable is an optional attribute of a method's Code attribute.

It may be used by debuggers to determine which part of the Java Virtual Machine code array corresponds to a given line number in the original source file. There may be more than one LineNumberTable attributes in the Code attribute, and their order is unspecified. Moreover, the mapping from code addresses to source lines does not have to be in a one-to-one correspondence.

The structure of each entry in the line number table is as follows:

• start_pc - index in the Code array
• line_number - number of the source code line, corresponding to the given bytecode instruction